Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools oyu have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.

Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.